Navigating the rapids, or any rapids is not something familiar to me. In metaphor, I certainly have images of what it might be like. I have gone kayaking and have limited experience with that so please bear with me as I spin out this metaphor of aging. Aging: a word that makes me feel crumpled and ineffective. I’m not even comfortable when I hear phrases such as ‘this late stage of life’, ‘bucket list’, ‘before I die’. I could go on and on, however I won’t. Any of them are reminders to me not necessarily of my own mortality, but of the stigma that is attached to each decade. I am approaching, rapidly, my 70th birthday in a couple of weeks. Finding inner balance in the last ten years has frequently brought up this metaphor of ‘navigating the rapids’.
Yesterday, I met with two of my nursing classmates for planning our 50th Nursing Reunion of the class of 1968. We pulled out pictures of the class, talked about who we’ve lost contact with and who is coming to our Reunion in April of 2018. We talked with the same excitement we had in those three years, maybe a little bit worn around the edges, but we were planning for our future activities. A future involving visiting, site seeing, visiting, staying up late, eating, being silly and having fun in each other’s company. Many have not seen each other since we graduated! After lunch and touring the hotel to visualize our rooms we each returned to our own lives. It is there that the navigation has the potential for stalling.
It is so tempting to just fall over into the old beliefs. Get washed away in the cold, frothing rapids of life’s twists and turns. The other day, I was sorting through my family’s silver cutlery chest, clearing out the pile of buttons and pins that really had no business in being there. They had gathered there like errant children who needed a place to be, each story jumbled and tucked away. There were name tags from St. Mary of the Plains Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, from the School of Nursing at Texas Tech, and just an ordinary name tag. Then there was a tiny plastic box with my dad’s Elk’s pin, a very dirty lanyard from the University of Utah, a couple of jewelry store boxes (no gems inside) and from Saskatchewan, grubby Softball League patches from my son’s jean jacket. And then there’s an unopened seed packet, another name tag from a treatment centre in Kelowna and many more. To top it all off was a big yellow button with blue writing that read: ‘My inner child is a juvenile delinquent.’
That child has been riding rapids for many years. That child has ridden the rapids in the wind and rain, sunshine and cloudless days, all with the intent to just have fun, which could sound pretty shallow. However, in order to find fun in the midst of even the worst of tragedies, in the times when the kayak has overturned, the rapids have been too fast, when drowning seemed inevitable, reaching out to those around saved the day. I may have come out dripping wet, my soul stripped clean and raw, when accepting the unacceptable seems impossible, if I turn to that juvenile delinquent, my soul, for balance, for guidance I can navigate the rapids of advancing maturity.
“Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important
to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.”
~ Isaac Asimov
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